The proliferation of the Internet has led to the creation of a new form of commerce, generally referred to as Internet or electronic commerce (E-commerce). E-commerce enables users to sell and purchase items from a worldwide community connected via the Internet. This added simplicity, coupled with the continually reduced costs and increasing processing speed of modern-day computers, has led to the inclusion of a personal computer (PC) in many homes throughout the world. Unfortunately, the proliferation of PCs within the homes throughout the world, as well as the use of such PCs for E-commerce, often results in the storage of sensitive information within a computer.
As a result, computer users become susceptible to rogue agents, which may desire to gain access to secure information loaded within their personal computer. In order to combat the various rogue agents from gaining access to the secure information, many computer systems employ some form of cryptographs in order to prevent access to sensitive information. As known to those skilled in the art, cryptography provides a technique for keeping information secret, for determining that the information has not been tampered with and for determining who authored pieces of information.
One form of cryptography involves public/private key systems. Public/private key systems encrypt information prior to transmission using a public key and decrypting received encrypted information using a private key that is only known to the recipient of the encrypted information. However, once the sensitive information arrives at its designated location, the information is often decrypted and stored in a clear format. In other words, the sensitive information is not maintained in a secure format at its destination. As a result, during operation of a PC, a rogue agent could possibly gain access to the PC and gain access to sensitive information.
Furthermore, the proliferation of E-commerce has led to the availability of media applications, such as motion pictures and music, which may be downloaded to a PC for one-time use or for use for a predetermined period of time. Unfortunately, without some mechanism for protecting the contents of such media applications from access by rogue agents, E-commerce involving media applications may be prohibitive to the media providers. As a result, media or content providers may be reluctant to create high quality media or content providing applications when such content may be susceptible to rogue agents.